The Alpin team recently had the pleasure of exhibiting at SecureWorld Denver 2018. The conference was full of friendly hosts, fantastic speakers with great original content, and new solution providers like Alpin.

Hello from our team!

The Alpin team, including an awesome Daenerys Targaryen cosplay rocked by our wonderful Customer Success manager, Laura (costumes were welcome, it was Halloween!)

So what did we learn from SecureWorld 2018? Here are a few takeaways from conversations, presentations, and discussions:

The hardest part about working in compliance? People. People create challenges for compliance professionals. Yet, we need the cooperation of others to achieve organizational compliance.

Some of the best compliance people I have worked with treated compliance as a team goal. Their role was to help, educate, and guide others. SaaS management, at a minimum, can give you the visibility to know who to help and how urgently.

And more importantly, there are now some SaaS management tools that highlight vendor compliance status, and even help automate some compliance tasks.

Side note, if you haven’t looked, there’s an unexpected abundance of compliance-related memes (please note the Barbra Streisand one).

Good question. In the era of spiraling SaS costs, companies want to know how to rein in cloud software.

What’s the solution?

Well, we think Alpin is at least part of the solution, and most likely, it’s all you need. What Alpin does has been called many things: SaaS Management. SaaS Optimization. SAM for SaaS. ITAM for cloud software. CASB lite.

We’ve tried our best to lay out the benefits for you here. There’s a lot to cover, so this is part one of a multi-part series. Here, we’ll quickly summarize the benefits in various areas:

Different mechanism, but similar outcome: G Suite users and admins should realize that users signing into applications via the extremely popular Connect with Google button gives those web apps access to corporate data — often full access to email contents, calendars, contacts, and more.

Alpin shows a list of apps with dangerous access, and allows you to blacklist them in 1 click.

It’s an interesting time to be a vendor manager. The number of vendors, often SaaS providers, continues to grow.

And much of that growth is shadow IT, where department heads or front-line employees are managing those SaaS relationships — if you can call signing up and setting up credit card auto-renewal “managing.”

A CIO’s reaction when Alpin revealed 10x more cloud apps than they anticipated.

Firms have also been permissive of departments seeking out their own solutions, keeping themselves agile.

The reaction to that permissive attitude has begun. And whenever the next recession or correction hits, we should expect the pace to increase quickly, as the focus turns to rapid-fire cost-cutting initiatives.

And what will help SaaS vendor managers face this challenge? Ironically, more SaaS. But it only takes 1 app to bring order to the chaos.